Science meets Engineering of Deep Learning

Deep learning can still be a complex mix of art and engineering despite its tremendous success in recent years, and there is still progress to be made before it has fully evolved into a mature scientific discipline. The interdependence of architecture, data, and optimization gives rise to an enormous landscape of design and performance intricacies that are not well-understood. The evolution from engineering towards science in deep learning can be achieved by pushing the disciplinary boundaries. Unlike in the natural and physical sciences -- where experimental capabilities can hamper progress, i.e. limitations in what quantities can be probed and measured in physical systems, how much and how often -- in deep learning the vast majority of relevant quantities that we wish to measure can be tracked in some way. As such, a greater limiting factor towards scientific understanding and principled design in deep learning is how to insightfully harness the tremendous collective experimental capability of the field. As a community, some primary aims would be to (i) identify obstacles to better models and algorithms, (ii) identify the general trends that are potentially important which we wish to understand scientifically and potentially theoretically and; (iii) careful design of scientific experiments whose purpose is to clearly resolve and pinpoint the origin of mysteries (so-called 'smoking-gun' experiments).